Why networks and collaborations

Networks and collaborative practices have long been a key to how people organised themselves for socialisation and survival. In modern society they remain just as important: helping us to work together to solve complex and persistent problems, generate new and innovative products and services, increasing our productivity and resilience, link up fragmented services, create new music and art forms and generally reach out across boundaries to build social connections. Building networks and working collaboratively makes a lot of sense and can deliver many things that are not possible by working alone. But they don’t always happen organically or by magic. Most are hard to create and even harder to sustain. They are also not business as usual and require new ways of thinking, behaving, managing, leading and evaluating.